Fortune Favors (35 page)

“We both know it’s down there, so by all rights, I should kill you now just so you don’t queer my plans with that devilish luck of yours. But no, I think it’s better to use your gift to my own advantage.” Leeds clapped him on the shoulder. “Cheer up, Kismet. If you really are what they think you are, then you’ll probably be the first one to see the Fountain of Youth.”

“What does that mean?”

Leeds nodded to his nearest hireling, and the man stepped forward, brandishing a cheap- looking switchblade which he used to slice through the tape holding Kismet’s hands together. Kismet flexed his arms for a moment, trying to restore the circulation to stiff muscles, but also stalling for time—time in which to figure out how to transform Leeds’ reprieve into an opportunity to turn the tables.

“So, you want me to dive down and find the entrance?”

Leeds’ man put away the switchblade and then bent over the pile of diving equipment. A moment later, he produced a weight belt which he buckled in place around Kismet’s waist.

“Something like that.” Leeds smiled his death’s head grin. “Once you are inside the cavern, should you succeed in reaching it, you will be on your own for a few moments. My man will follow behind you, and if he does not signal back promptly, I shall feed Miss Crane to the alligators. Understood?”

Annie seemed confused by the exchange and glanced at Kismet. He was trying to think of something to say, some words of assurance, but before anything came to him, a shove from Leeds’ goon pitched him over the edge of the boat and into the water beside Russell. Unlike Russell, who wore a bib-like buoyancy compensator, Kismet’s only equipment was a twenty-two pound weight belt. He sank like a stone. The last thing he heard was Annie's scream of outrage, before water filled his ears.

The ballast pulled him into the cenote faster than he would have believed. The pressure built in his ears rapidly; his head felt as if it were about to burst. The unexpected shove had caught him completely unprepared. He’d gasped in the instant that he hit the water, but had inhaled almost as much water as air. He flailed uselessly to get control, coughing up great clouds of bubbles from his saturated lungs, as his involuntary descent continued unchecked.

He struggled for the clasp of the weight belt; it was fastened at the small of his back, and try as he might, he could not seem to loosen it.

He saw a blur of illumination floating nearby—Russell, just a few feet away, inverted and kicking with his flippers to match Kismet’s rate of descent into the dark hole. He couldn’t believe that the officer would just let him drown, but Russell made no move toward him. His attention seemed to be fixed on the shadowy recesses of the cenote.

Kismet felt his chest start to convulse, both from the water he had ingested and the need to inhale. His ears popped, briefly relieving the agony of pressure against his skull, and in that moment, he crashed into something.

The sides of the cenote were dark and ominous, and just barely out of reach, but jutting out from the submerged face was an outcropping of slimy limestone. He had slammed into the protrusion, but was now beginning to drift away from it. He stretched out his fingers, touching the stone, but was unable to grip the slippery surface. His fingernails scraped through a layer of algae, then slipped free.

He dropped rapidly again, the pressure building in his ears. His outstretched fingertips scraped against the vertical surface of the sheer rock face, but there was nothing to grab onto, nothing to halt or reverse his descent. He tried paddling with his hands and kicking with his bound feet, to get closer to wall and find some sort of handhold.

The pressure in his head became unbearable. He gave up trying to swim. A primal, instinctive response forced him to grip his ears with either hand. He snorted through his nose, but the air pocket inside his head resisted. Suddenly he had no more breath with which to combat the increasing pressure. His lungs were empty; his diaphragm was quivering in his abdomen with the need to draw breath.

The pressure barrier broke of its own accord. Kismet opened his mouth to cry out as water rushed painfully into his ear canal, but there was nothing with which to form a scream. His head felt as if it had been ripped apart by the sudden release, and his ears were filled with an agonized ringing.

Then, miraculously, his hand caught on another ledge. A horizontal fissure split the rock face directly before him. The lip to which he was clinging was the bottom of that fissure, but he could make out no details as to what lay inside the impenetrable shadows of the recess.

He tried to reach into the fissure, but again the weight belt pulled him away. His handhold failed and he tumbled away from the ledge. The darkness of the lake bottom seemed to rise up to greet him into its eternal embrace.

When he hit the lake bottom, Kismet immediately sank up to his knees in deep muck, while the resulting cloud of silt completely shrouded him in blackness.

Impotent rage consumed him. He wrenched with his legs, trying to free them from the suction of the submerged mud. An involuntary gasp brought a trickle of water into his windpipe, triggering a violent paroxysm, yet there was no air in his lungs with which to cough. In desperation, he plunged his hands into the mud, tearing at his boots, trying to pull his feet free, but his fingers could find no purchase, and he fell backwards into the mud.

The shift in position created just enough of a gap to allow water to flow between his foot and the sucking mud, and just like that, his left foot came free, not only of the mud but also the duct tape that had bound his ankles together. With renewed hope, he wrenched his right leg. The boot stayed fixed in place, but the laces relented and his right foot was free as well.

Yet he was still a prisoner of the bottom. The mud surrounded him; everywhere he put a hand or foot, it threatened to hold him fast. It would do no good to extricate himself from the mud if he could not swim to the surface, yet even with his feet free to kick, he just wasn’t strong enough to swim to the surface with the added ballast of the weight belt. He tore at it, felt it slip around until the clasp was in the front. It came apart with astonishing ease and he kicked up, away from the mud.

He started to sink immediately. There was no air left in his lungs to buoy him up. He fought and thrashed, trying to climb through the water to the surface, but to no avail. Because he was immersed in darkness, he couldn’t tell that his vision was tunneling as his brain started to shut down. There was nothing at all to mark his slide into unconsciousness or that moment when his need to breathe became absolute and he took a deep, involuntary breath.

* * *

Through the crystalline waters of the lake, Russell’s bright dive light, illuminated every detail of Kismet' struggle for the passengers on the boat. When Kismet’s grip on the ledge failed, Annie cried aloud, “Pull him up!”

She turned to Leeds, pleading. “He's no good to you dead.”

The occult scholar watched without expression as Kismet disappeared in a cloud of silt upon touching down at the bottom. “It would seem I overestimated him.”

“You can still save him,” she cried. “Please!”

“She’s right, Leeds.” It was her father, unexpectedly rising to her defense. “He’s more useful to us alive. Bring him up and let him try again.”

Leeds looked away from the lake and fixed Higgins with an imperious stare. “Why?”

“You wanted him to find the cavern with the Fountain.”

“And he has. The ledge where his hold failed is surely the cave entrance. Major Russell will run a line inside and explore the interior to see if there are dry spaces beyond. We are nearly there!” Leeds seemed positively exultant.

Horrified and helpless, Annie could only stare into the depths and the billowing sediment cloud that concealed Kismet’s fate.

SIXTEEN

Kismet’s next memory was of coughing violently, vomiting up water from his lungs, as he lay on a hard sloped surface. He was vaguely aware of a firm hand on his right arm, but his body continued to be racked with spasms and for a moment, that single imperative was the only thing that mattered. Finally, as the fit began to subside, he began looking around.

He didn’t think about the fact that he could see until his eyes fell on a bright waterproof flashlight dangling above the gray-white stone surface beneath him. In its glow, he could make out the rest of his environment; he was in a low ceilinged tunnel—a mere crack in the limestone—that sloped up and away from the lake water, which still lapped gently at his feet. The light was tethered to the belt of the wet-suited figure leaning over him and still gripping his arm.

“I think you’re going to make it,” Russell announced.

“You saved me,” Kismet said, between coughing fits. “What the hell did you do that for?”

 The major eased back on his haunches. “I think we both know that this isn’t going to end the way Leeds has planned. He’s bitten off a lot more than he can chew.”

“So, where does that leave you exactly? You save me, and then when the feds arrive and start arresting everyone, you can claim that you were one of the good guys?”

Russell shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t know. You probably won’t believe me when I say it, but I do have my orders. And right now, I’m doing my damnedest to follow those orders without letting that psychopath kill you.”

The admission stunned Kismet, almost as much as Leeds’ cryptic revelations about Prometheus. But before he could inquire further, Russell slid his diving mask down over his face.

“I need to get topside again. Pretty soon, everyone’s going to be down here. Leeds still has your little girlfriend and he won’t hesitate to hurt her to get you...or her father...to do what he wants. I suggest you just sit tight and wait. If you can refrain from rocking the boat, there’s a chance we all might survive this.”

With that, the man dropped back into the water, leaving Kismet in absolute darkness. He was still coughing intermittently, but in the quiet spaces in between, he tried to use his other senses to compensate for his total blindness. The musty air smelled disgusting, like something rotting, but it was breathable. The only sound he could hear was water sloshing at his feet, but the way it echoed gave the impression of being in a much larger space than what he had imagined based on his brief glimpse. Cautiously, he got to his hands and knees and then stood up.

With a hand stretched out in front of him, he started forward. The loss of a boot interfered with his gait, so he kicked the remaining one off and proceeded forward in just his socks, probing with both his toes and his outstretched hand before advancing.

He hadn’t gone more than about fifty feet when a splashing noise echoed up the tunnel, accompanied by the glow from a pair of dive lights. He glanced back to find Russell, and another figure climbing out of the water. It was Elisabeth Neuell.

She wore no SCUBA gear—save for a face mask—and no wetsuit. Instead, she was clad only in matching lacy white bra and panties; dry, the undergarments wouldn’t have left much to the imagination, and soaking wet, they were nearly transparent as well. She stripped off the mask, cursing when the rubber strap caught a strand of her golden hair, and then realized that she and Russell were not alone.

“Nick!”

For the briefest instant, her face clouded with something like worry, even fear, but then her expression transformed into a dazzlingly perfect, plastic Hollywood smile. She immediately began to shiver in the cool tunnel. Goose pimples appeared on the bare skin of her arms and she hugged herself for a moment, framing her breasts with her arms and accentuating her piercingly erect nipples. Her coquettish pose reminded him of their first meeting in Jin’s fortress—the first time she had tried to arrange his death.

Another figure emerged from the water, one of Leeds’ hirelings, likewise wearing just a face mask and underwear—Confederate battle flag boxer shorts. He was holding a dry bag, and upon seeing Kismet, quickly opened it and took out a pistol.

“Put that thing away,” Elisabeth said. She tried to sound commanding but her shivering made her sound like a harried babysitter pleading with a wayward child.

“Screw you, lady. I’m fed up with jumping through hoops for you and that damn freak. So unless you’ gonna do something with that ass ah yours ‘sides wiggling it, I think I’ll just have me a looksee at this here cave that y’all’re so wound up about.”

Kismet stepped aside as the man, still clutching the dry bag in one hand and the pistol in the other, charged up the sloping tunnel.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Russell cautioned belatedly.

The hand with the pistol came up, middle finger extended in the air. “Screw you, too. I ain’t in your army.”

Elisabeth was still sputtering with unfocused rage as the man reached the top of the rise and then stepped over, out of their line of sight.

A loud snap thrummed in the still air, followed immediately by a wet squishing noise. A grunted curse drifted back down the tunnel, and then something heavy crashed to the floor and everything was quiet again.

Kismet shared a confused look with Elisabeth and Russell, but before anyone could voice an inquiry, the pool behind them erupted in a plume like an underwater explosion, and Higgins, with a thrashing Annie locked under one arm, came into view.

Annie, who had only just a couple days earlier suffered a nearly paralyzing bout of claustrophobia, was in full panic mode. Kismet could only imagine her reaction to being ordered to dive into a dark, water-filled hole, and then told to swim into another dark hole with millions of tons of earth poised to bury her alive. He wondered why Leeds hadn’t simply just left her topside and saved himself the trouble, but then realized the obvious answer; she was the leverage that would buy continued cooperation from himself and Kismet.

Annie had not stripped down for the swim, and so now was fully clothed but soaking wet. She remained on the verge of hysteria, but when she saw Kismet she brightened a little and wrestled free of her father’s protective grasp to rush up the tunnel and embrace him.